"O.K. Who do we want?"
"Same gang as usual. Chuck and Freddie Thomas, Warren, Wes Farrell, of course, and you can get Jim Baler into it, too. No, Walt, Christine Baler is not the kind of people you haul into a screwdriver meeting."
"I was merely thinking."
"I know. But you're needed, and if she were around, you'd be a total loss as far as cerebration."
"I like her."
"So does Barney Carroll."
"Um! But he isn't here. O.K., no Christine in our conference. I'll have Jeanne call the screwballs on the communicator."
They dribbled into Farrell's laboratory one by one, and then Don said:
"We have a detector. It is about as efficient as a slab of marble; only more so. We can get a tinkle of about ten micromicroamps at twenty feet distance from a driver tube using eight KVA input, which if we rate this in the usual spaceship efficiency, comes to about one-half G. That's about standard, for driver tubes, since they run four to a ship at two G total.
"Now, that is peanuts. We should be able to wind a megammeter around the peg at twenty feet. Why, the red ionization comes out of the tube and hits our so-called detector, and the amount of ozone it creates is terrific. Yet we can't get a good reading out of it."